Any time Facebook talks about technical matters I tend to listen. They have a track record of demonstrating engineering leadership in several spaces. And, unlike many companies that just talk, Facebook often gives others access to those ideas via source code and healthy open source projects.

How cool would it be to fix that one bug you just found without having to download a source package? and without leaving your browser? Inspired by github's online code editing, during Debconf 14 I worked on integrating an onl...

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Lots of good +Mercurial stuff coming out of Facebook these days! You can now get sparse checkouts (creating only part of your working copy — makes "hg status", "hg diff", etc faster) and shallow clones (download only the latest version of your files). This makes it much easier to work with gigantic repositories. There's also a push-rebase extension that does SVN-like merging (rebase, really) on the server side to avoid races on push. Sounds convenient, but it implies a non-pull request workflow.

They've also released a great hgwatchman extension that makes "hg status" instantaneous by using inotify or fsevents to listen for filesystem modifications. Most other commands also get a speed boost since they call status under the hood.

Very exciting developments! The question is now if it's too late to matter for regular developers... Given the dominance of +Git, will Mercurial will end up being the hyper-scalable revision control system used by a few big corporations?﻿

GNOME 3.16 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of six months' work by the GNOME project. It includes major new features, as well as a large number of smaller improvements and enhancements. The release incorporates 33525 changes, made by approximately 1043 contributors.

I’d like to introduce the remotenames extension I’ve been working on. It is derived from Augie Fackler’s remotebranches extension. This extension keeps track of remote branches and remote bookmarks. Built on top of the namespaces API in Mercurial, it requires version 3.3 or above.﻿

The equivalent of a writer staring at a blank page, wondering how to fill it, is a composer staring at the 88 black and white notes on a piano wondering how to compose a melody that's never been heard before. How can one possibly take the eight notes of a standard scale and write a brand new ...